Finding Amelia The True Story of the Earhart Electra

Finding Amelia
The True Story of the Earhart Electra
by Ric Gillespie
Chapter One: “The Twin-Engined Lockheed”
1932 – 1934
Sometimes the door of history swings on small hidden hinges. Were it not for the
persistence of a precocious young engineer and the influence of a celebrity consultant,
the reincarnation of a company that became and remains a giant of the aviation industry
may have died with the failure of its first aircraft.
1932: Infant Mortality: The Demise and
Precarious Rebirth of Lockheed
Interest in aviation had fairly exploded in the
wake of Lindbergh’s 1927 transatlantic triumph,
but the general public’s appetite for new records
and new heroes did not translate into widespread
use of air travel. And who could blame them?
Lumbering 100 mph trimotors slogged through
bumpy weather, their cabins reeking of vomit.
Crashes were commonplace. When Herbert Hoover
took office in 1928 there were forty-four separate
carriers vying for a share of the market. Many
were under-capitalized, skating by with antiquated
airplanes that often flew with only the crew aboard.
No airline could turn a profit without governmentsubsidized airmail contracts.
One bright spot in the otherwise bleak
commercial aviation landscape was the Lockheed
Aircraft Company. From 1927 to 1932, Lockheed,
founded in 1912 by brothers Allan and Malcolm
Loughhead (a Scottish name pronounced
Lawkheed) built fast single-engine airplanes with
sleek molded-plywood bodies and cantilevered
wooden wings. Flown by customers with names
like Post, Earhart, Lindbergh, and Kingsford-Smith,
Lockheed aircraft set records of every description.
The Model 9 Orion, a six passenger, 200 mph, single-
Lockheed Model 9C Orion “Shellightning” flown by Jimmy
Doolittle.
engine airliner with retractable landing gear, was
faster than the military fighters of its day.
Through no fault of its own, Lockheed’s fortunes
changed in the sky over Kansas on the last day of
March 1931, when Transcontinental & Western
Flight 599 shed a wing and plunged to the ground
carrying legendary Notre Dame coach Knute
Rockne and seven others to their deaths. When it
was determined that moisture had weakened the
wooden wing of the Fokker F10 trimotor, the public’s
faith in biodegradable airliners followed Rockne to
the grave. Almost overnight, an airline that did not
operate all-metal equipment flew empty airplanes.
Sales of new Lockheeds virtually ceased and by
October the company was in receivership. On June
16, 1932 the Title Insurance and Trust Company
of Los Angeles locked the doors of the Burbank
factory.1
The wooden-airplane Lockheed Aircraft
Company was dead, but just five days later the
company was reborn, its assets purchased for
$40,000 by a group of investors who saw a new
day dawning for commercial aviation. The rise in
demand for all-metal airplanes coincided with a
revolution in aircraft design. Advances in materials
and techniques meant that rather than fastening
sheets of corrugated aluminum to a supporting
steel-tube framework, as in the Ford “Tin Goose”
trimotor, an aircraft’s external covering, the
aluminum “skin,” would carry the aerodynamic
load. Semi-monocoque construction would mean
tremendous savings in weight, and reduction in
aerodynamic drag resulting in a quantum leap in
speed and payload.
R. J. Francillon, Lockheed Aircraft Since 1913 (Annapolis,
Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 1987), 13.
1
54
A new Lockheed design team headed by Lloyd
C. Stearman began sketching out a stressed-skin,
all metal, low wing monoplane with retractable
landing gear carrying two pilots and ten passengers.
The proposed aircraft was basically an enlarged,
metal Model 9 and, like the Orion and all previous
Lockheeds, it was to have a single engine. To
preserve the appearance of continuity with the
former company, the new design was designated
the Model 10 and, in keeping with the Lockheed
tradition of naming its products after celestial
bodies, it was named “Electra” after a star in the
Pleiades Cluster of the constellation Taurus. The
design was a logical, conservative step for the
new company but Chairman and Treasurer Robert
Ellsworth Gross saw a problem. Gross looked at the
market place and became convinced that the future
of commercial sales was in multi-engine aircraft.
The design team agreed to add a second engine.
It was a wise move. Two years later the U.S. Civil
Aeronautics Authority banned the commercial use
of single-engine aircraft on domestic routes at night
and over rough terrain.
twelve-passenger Douglas DC-1 made its first flight
on July 1, 1933. Only one was built, but the followon DC-2 was soon flying with a wide range of U.S
and international carriers. The Douglas design’s
next iteration, the DC-3, would become a legend.
In deciding to accept the high development
costs of the twin-engine aircraft with no sales orders
in hand, Robert Gross was betting the farm on the
success of an airplane that existed only on paper.
By March of 1933 the new design was ready
for wind-tunnel analysis. Lockheed sent a scale
model to Professor Edward Stalker, aerodynamicist
at the University of Michigan’s Department of
Aeronautics. The mock-up featured a single vertical
fin and rudder, large wing fillets (graceful fairings
that swept from the wing root to the fuselage), and a
rearward sloping windshield. The young graduate
student who ran the tests, Clarence “Kelly” Johnson,
didn’t think much of the results. “It had very
bad longitudinal stability and directional control
problems.”2 The student’s opinion was ignored
1933: Betting the Farm on a Flawed Design
Lockheed Aircraft Corporation was a latecomer
to the revolution. The company’s new airliner was
still on the drawing board when the first of the
new breed of commercial aircraft took to the air on
February 8, 1933. The Boeing Model 247 was a tenpassenger, twin-engine monoplane of stressed-skin
aluminum construction with retractable wheels
that cruised at nearly twice the speed of existing
airliners. The new airplane would be going to
United Airlines, the Boeing company’s own airline.
Not to be outdone, Transcontinental & Western
Airlines (TWA), still recovering from the Rockne
disaster, asked designer Donald Douglas to develop
an airliner that could compete with the 247. The
Above: Boeing Model 247 Below: Douglas DC-1.
Lockheed Model 10 wind tunnel model with Clarence
“Kelly” Johnson.
and Professor Stalker, in consultation with Lloyd
Stearman, decided the design was acceptable. The
directors decided to go ahead with construction
of a prototype. What Lockheed needed now was a
customer.
Enter Amelia Earhart
In 1933, Northwest Airways in St. Paul,
Minnesota was a small regional carrier with
one 350-mile route between Minneapolis and
Chicago, and a secondary route of similar length
to Winnipeg, Manitoba. The changing political
climate promised opportunities for growth.
On Sunday, March 4, Franklin Roosevelt had
been sworn in as the 32nd Chief Executive of the
United States, assuring a country wracked by
unemployment and bank failures that “the only
thing we have to fear is fear itself.” More to the
2
Clarence L. Johnson, Kelly: More Than My Share Of it
All (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1985), 21.
55
point for Northwest Airways founder Col. Lewis
Brittin, his airline need no longer fear the U.S. Post
Office.
One of the new president’s first official acts had
been to fire Postmaster General Walter F. Brown,
ending the corruption and favoritism that awarded
the lucrative intercontinental airmail contracts to
giants United Airlines, Transcontinental & Western
Airlines (TWA), American Airlines, and Eastern
Air Transport while leaving regional carriers like
Northwest to survive on the scraps.
Lewis Brittin knew that Roosevelt’s victory
heralded an opportunity for Northwest to bid the
coveted airmail contract for the northern route
from Minneapolis to Seattle. Also in play was a
proposed federal appropriation of $1.2 million
dollars for airfield and facilities improvements
along the 1,500 mile route. To land this windfall
Northwest would need to make its case in
Washington, and the airline’s general manager
John Croil Hunter was courting just the person
who might be able to help. In January 1933, he
invited Amelia Earhart to fly as a guest aboard a
Northwest Airways Ford Trimotor on a portion
passenger Hamilton H-47s and fifteen-passenger
Ford 5AT Tri-motors. Later that spring, when Croil
Hunter expressed interest in the new Lockheed
ship, Robert Gross was quick to schedule a
sales call. Before Gross arrived Hunter solicited
Amelia’s opinion about what Northwest should be
looking for if it chose to go with the twin-engine
Lockheed, still in the design stage and a year from
its first flight. Like the invitation to accompany the
January survey flight, Hunter’s query appears to
be primarily an effort to keep Earhart engaged.
Amelia’s value to Northwest was not her technical
expertise but the influence she might be able to
exert in Washington to make Northwest’s need for
new airplanes a reality.
Earhart replied with her recommendations on
March 9, 1933. In light of later events, the letter
fairly drips with irony. Her own twin-engined
Lockheed and her ill-fated world flight were years
over the horizon, but the letter is sprinkled with
the opinions and attitudes that would be her
undoing (see spread pp. 58-59).
A few days after Hunter received Earhart’s
letter, Brittin wrote to him, “Amelia Earhart had
lunch last week at the White House and I think it is
quite possible a meeting could be arranged when
we could lay our problem … directly before the
new Administration.”4 Ultimately, Northwest got
the airmail contract and Northwest ordered new
airplanes. To what extent Amelia’s endorsement
of Robert Gross “and his gang” influenced
Northwest’s decision to be the first to place orders
for the Model 10 is unknown and unknowable, but
the thirteen Electras Northwest ordered saved the
Lockheed company and launched a production
run that eventually totaled 148 airplanes, including
the one in which Earhart would meet her fate.
Fixing the Flaws
Northwest Airways survey flight crew with guest Amelia
Earhart.Minnesota Historical Society, used by permission.
of the northern route to “assess the desirability
of flying the route in mid-winter.”3 The Northwest
crew had far more experience than Earhart who
had never flown for an airline. Amelia rode as a
passenger in the frigid cabin. It is difficult to see
her participation in the flight as anything more
than a flattering, and successful, publicity stunt.
To service the hoped-for route, Northwest
would need to upgrade its fleet of single engine, six
3
Doris Rich, Amelia Earhart: A Biography (Washington,
DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1989), 170.
While Robert Gross was trying to find a buyer
for his paper airplane, Kelly Johnson was trying
to make sure that the final product would be
worth selling. As a grad student at the University
of Michigan, Johnson had found the design to
be badly flawed and had disagreed with the
university’s official wind-tunnel report. Upon
receiving his Master of Science degree, he bought a
used Chevy and drove to Burbank to ask Lockheed
for a job. He was hired to work in tool design for
$83/month. “I think an important reason for my
being hired was that I had run the wind-tunnel test
on the company’s new plane.” Kelly Johnson was
4
Rich.
56
never known for his tact, and he wasted no time
in telling his new employers that their new design
was unstable. He persisted in his criticism until
Lockheed Chief Engineer Hall Hibbard relented.
“Why don’t you go back and see if you can do any
better with the airplane?” Johnson headed back
to Michigan with the wooden model in the back of
the Chevy.5
It took Kelly Johnson seventy-two further windtunnel tests to isolate the problems with the Model
10 design and come up with solutions. The wing
fillets and the inverted-slope windshield, although
5
much in fashion, were disturbing the airflow and
causing unnecessary drag. More seriously, the
single vertical fin and rudder lacked sufficient
authority to hold the aircraft straight in the event
of an engine failure. Johnson returned to Burbank
with his recommendation that the wing fillets
be removed, the windshield be replaced with a
conventional design, and the aircraft be given
a twin tail. Hibbard was pleased with Johnson’s
work and promoted him to full-fledged engineer.
He agreed to change the tail but the fillets and
reverse-slope windshield remained.
Johnson, 23.
1934: A Star Is Born
Prototype Model 10A with wing fillets and reverse-slope windshield.
The prototype Model 10A flew for the first time on February 23, 1934 with chief test pilot Marshall
“Babe” Headle at the controls. The airplane performed well but Kelly Johnson had been right. The wing
fillets and funky windshield would have to go. With those changes made, airworthiness certification
trials were successfully completed that spring and constructor’s number (c/n) 1001 was delivered to
Northwest Airways as NC233Y on June 29, 1934.6
Five versions of the Model 10 were ultimately offered:
■■ The Model 10A was powered by two 450 hp Pratt & Whitney R985 Wasp Jr. engines. A total of 101
10As were built representing over two-thirds of the total Electra production run.
6
57
Francillon, 120.
58
59
■■ The Model 10B was powered by two 440 hp Wright R975-E3 Whirlwind engines. Eighteen customers
preferred the Wright engine.
■■ The Model 10C was powered by two 450 hp Pratt & Whitney R1340 SC1 Wasp engines. The 10C was
an accommodation for Pan American Airways. PanAm had a surplus of old SC1 Wasps and offered
to become Lockheed’s second customer for the Electra if they could save money by providing their
own engines. Eight 10Cs were built.
■■ The Model 10D was a proposed military version. In the mid-1930s, recognition that light, singleengine fighters would not have sufficient range to escort bombers to and from distant targets led
to the development of long range, multi-engine “heavy fighters.” Lockheed’s offering was to have a
crew of three and be armed with a 37 mm cannon and three .50 caliber machine guns. There were
no takers and the Model D was never built.
■■ The Model 10E was powered by two 550 hp Pratt & Whitney R1340 S3H1 Wasp engines. When PanAm
ran out of SC1 Wasps they asked Lockheed for Electras equipped with the new, more powerful
S3H1 version of the R1340. Fifteen 10Es were eventually produced including two “10E Specials,” a
modification that eliminated most of the cabin windows and replaced the ten passenger seats with
fuel tanks for long-range, record setting flights.
The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery
2366 Hickory Hill Road
Oxford, PA 19363-4177
USA
www.tighar.org
610.467.1937
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